Behind the Wall, There is a Landscape

Since 2021, Berni Puig (Castellbell i el Vilar, Catalonia, 1990) has been exploring the relationship  between architecture and the landscape that surrounds it. His practice grew out of mural and  outdoor painting, where the wall is both a space of action and a form of resistance to time. In his  early work, he made colour studies of the land around a building and painted them directly onto its  outer walls, distilling the palette of its surroundings and folding the building back into its landscape.  

Gradually, the wall itself became his material. The strappo, a technique historically used to transfer  frescoes from churches to museums, allows him to turn these old walls into the very canvas that  holds the painting. It is an ambivalent gesture, one of loss but also of care: the artist carries the  memory of a place, its skin, its history, the traces left by time. He always works with abandoned  rural buildings, where nature and construction shape one another. Built from the materials of the  land, they slowly return to it as nature finds its way back inside. Architecture is no longer his  support but his subject: not a boundary, but one more structure within a wider ecosystem of  landscape, light and colour. And if the building belongs to the landscape, the painting, in turn,  becomes an architecture.  

The paintings in Behind the wall, there is a landscape begin in Cal Rosal, near the artist’s studio, in  buildings left abandoned since the 1990s. Their walls were once painted in two colours, darker  below and lighter above, as was common in the 1960s and 70s. When Puig peels a canvas from  their white surface, decades of repainting come away with it, and the line between the two colours  becomes the horizon of an abstract, synthetic landscape. Each lifted canvas opens onto a new field.  

Over this horizon, Puig rebuilds the elements of the land he sees from his window, its flowers, trees  and stones, in an ordered yet abstract way. His colour, once carefully arranged, grows freer and  more chaotic, closer to nature itself. The paint he applies is made from the same materials as the  walls, so that the boundary between background and intervention blurs. The technique, like the  countryside, is alive: Puig turns the canvases, soaks them, burns them, until the painting surprises  him and the landscape he was looking for appears. In nature, colour is shaped by light, by the land  and by time, and the research behind these canvases follows that same process.  

The exhibition brings together thirteen stretched canvases and, at the end of the path, two large scale unstretched canvases that recreate a room of Cal Rosal. Puig’s practice honours what has been  forgotten, buried beneath the years, and turns it into a place of passage. One house marked by time  opens onto another: an abandoned Catalan room finds new life inside this historic Singaporean  shophouse, and the artist invites us to step into the landscape that lies behind each of its walls.